


Hel(l)ipad

by stateofintegrity



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26503144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: Sniper fire pins some of the triage team on the helipad.
Relationships: Maxwell Klinger/Charles Emerson Winchester III
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	Hel(l)ipad

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swamp_thing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swamp_thing/gifts).



> This story owes something to the many artist renderings of Batman carrying a broken Joker (weird, I know) and John Musgrave's interviews for Ken Burn's Vietnam War documentary.

Being on triage duty meant moving at maximum speed up a rocky hill, ducking beneath helicopter blades, and making decisions about who would die and who  _ might _ have a chance to live. Triage duty flew in the face of the beliefs of a man whose creed was to do “one thing at a time, very well, and then move on.” 

Winchester was steady rather than swift. He preferred measured decisions to snap ones. He hated being ordered to carry a gun because some members of the “police action” refused to play by the rules of war. And while he had, by this endured artillery shelling, no one had ever targeted him... until now. 

Bullets whizzed, burying their snub noses in the dirt. Corpsmen pressed themselves over their charges, going low to drag the litters across the ground. Wounded men screamed - some in pain, some in fear. On his hands and knees, Winchester struggled to read the tags pinned to each body. On each, he added a one, two, or a three, indicating priority of care. He almost never got to write a three. 

What he was able to do, and it would save the three surgeons waiting below precious time, was start whole blood, plasma, or saline. What he was unable to do was stretch time and give more of it to the men who would now  _ not  _ be saved because a sniper had pinned them here. That lone gunman (Charles refused to think of him as brave) would be dispatched, of course. I Corps would be called, a chopper would come in. 

He just had to stay alive until then. 

Another body lay just at the edge of the dirt circle that served as their landing pad, boots pointed away into the brush. Charles had watched the same training films as everyone else. He knew that this might be a tactic, a body brought down at the periphery to serve as bait for the corpsman who tried to retrieve it or the doctor who sought to treat the fallen man. Crawling in a manner he felt was completely undignified for anyone anywhere ever, he made it to the man’s side only to break out in a cold sweat so sudden and drenching that he feared a newborn virus had him in its grip. 

He forced his cold fingers to unclench and fumble at the chin strap on the metal helmet, but those fingers  _ shook _ . Some jungle malady? Malaria? Ten day fever that would make a pyre of him and put this kid at risk? Whatever it was or might be, he didn’t have time for it. He turned the figure a little; there was blood beneath the broken form and he had to find its origin if he was going to stop its flow. 

A horrible scream rent the afternoon air then - a purely animal sound that had no business issuing from a human throat - and Charles looked around frantically to trace the sound for long seconds until he realized that  _ he  _ was the one crying out… and he was doing so because he  _ knew _ the dark locks dripping blood into his hands and onto a lace collar worn under shot up fatigues.

“Max…” 

Somehow - and Charles could give absolutely no sound, medical reason why this was the case - Klinger was conscious, despite the hole in his chest the size of a harvest apple. The boy mouthed something, his eyes stunned. Charles thought it was “Major.”

“Hush now,” Charles told him, packing that terrible wound, ignoring his pallor and the bullets still being fired - hot streaks in the air. “I am here. You will be okay.” 

_ You will. You must.  _

But he’d seen that wound. Even if he could get Klinger on a table  _ right now _ the odds… he did not permit himself to complete that thought.

Klinger found a remnant of his voice, felt around the hole in his lungs, the blood on his collar and sleeve. “... lying.” Then he smiled - a faint, fluttering thing like the motion of a wing discovering its own brokenness. “Glad… you, Charles.” He reached for and (impossibly enough) found his hand, curled his smaller digits inside like a kitten nuzzle-hiding in the side of a cat. “... knew, huh?” 

Charles did not know what Klinger was attempting to express; he just knew that he didn’t want last words. “Stay still. You’ll need your strength to heal.” 

_ It’s the lungs, Winchester,  _ his conscience cried at him, mocking him with all he knew and how very  _ useless _ it all was on the edge of this landing pit with the gentle, inimitable Corporal dying in his arms.  _ Or the heart. Your specialties. _

_ But tell the truth.  _

_ If Pierce called you over to a wound like this, you’d shake your head. You wouldn’t let the patient (as much as the dead are ever patients) see. To him, you’d say something kind and then order morphine to take the kid under, like weighting his body with rocks. Just stay down, you’d think. Don’t feel.  _

It was good advice for him as the sniper fire continued, but Charles never took it. 

***

No one who ever saw the Major come walking down from the helipad with the downed Corporal in his arms ever forgot it. The Major was dirty, face cut, eye swollen shut from a nearby explosion, his mouth was grim, set. The greens and browns of their uniforms were stained with blood. Klinger’s cloak dragged in the dirt; his head lolled. 

All three surgeons who had remained at the 4077th triaged the Corporal. 

“Get Mulcahy,” Hawk said. 

Klinger was still conscious and Charles held his hands over his ears. “No!” 

“Winchester,” Potter began, but he repeated himself.

“No! I brought him this far. I’ll work on him.”

“Someone should be working on  _ you _ !” BJ shouted, but Potter had seen something in the eye out of which Winchester could still see. 

“Let him try,” he pronounced. 

“Colonel!” 

“The boy deserves a chance.”

“And who’s going to step in when Winchester passes out?”

“Whoever has free hands.” 

***

Charles Emerson Winchester III - so nearly head of thoracic surgery at Boston General, in exile now - barely scrubbed despite the dirt he’d been kneeling in- the goal was, now, to prevent a pile of new, loose earth being placed over Maxwell’s broken form. 

_ Max _ … How strange, how the man’s name pulsed through the tissues of his brain, blood-borne, driven aground with every heartbeat.  _ Heart… break _ ? The thought - in words because Winchester’s thoughts, in his worst moments, were always composed of words rather than images, made no sense, and he pushed it away. He knew exactly how broken the man was, knew that the breaks were  _ ragged _ , too, the unclean and unkind cuts of high-powered rifle fire making, of the ribs, a China cabinet invaded by spider shot. Winchester needed no X-ray for this; he didn’t even need that horrible, gaping opening, the gory window through which he could see into Max’s chest… his hands had telegraphed the message to him at first touch. 

_ But I caught you. I held you. I brought you here.  _

Now he meant to catch the man’s retreating spirit. 

_ Max…  _ When he arrived at the table - his table, his patient, his… friend? Yes, Max would say yes, though they’d never expressed as much, one to the other - the Corporal was under, eyes closed and easier to bear now that the dark, long - so long! - lashes weren’t fluttering. 

He’d held Max in his arms on that awful hill where the dirt was still stained with his blood and he had watched the light leaking out of his eyes, drawn away by those bony fingers he fought so hard to loosen. It had been beautiful in a way, even as the young man’s blood pressure bottomed out, even as his tissues had drowned in the blood meant to sustain him, to watch his dark eyes change.  _ You are entering a new country _ , he’d thought, holding tighter to the dear little Corporal’s hand,  _ and I cannot follow _ . 

Now he meant to block the road. 

_ Not yet,  _ he thought as he asked for cruel, impersonal, hated instruments,  _ not now, dear heart. While I breathe, you will breathe also. If you suffer, then I will take your suffering into me and dispel it. I yet have some magic left in these hands, Maxwell, and if I must extinguish my gifts forever through overuse, I will do so, now… and be glad of it. Glad of how much I have to give, to sacrifice in your name.  _

Charles worked on only one patient that night. He spoke to no one but the personnel directly assisting him - the others were as ghosts - and, in his head, to Max. There, in that space where no one could hear him, he made a million promises and swore they would not be empty. He knew that Mulcahy was nearby as for every OR and Charles bargained with the man’s God as he’d never bargained with Him for himself, not even the night before a lobotomy operation his parents had threatened him with… then terminated. 

_ Take my gifts,  _ Charles told that Awesome and Invisible Force.  _ If you are there, then it was you who gave them to me. You know that they are the best I can offer. The best of me. Make of his body an altar if you must - there is blood enough on it even for you, I should think - but allow the sacrifice to be mine. Surely that makes more sense anyway. I have lineage, wealth, education, prestige. I make the better offering. True, his is the better heart, and I understand why you would, in your greed, wish to grasp it, but let my worthless heart take his place.  _

“Let’s close,” he said wearily. 

***

Something cool pressed against the eye he was holding shut. Charles opened the good one to see his CO at his side with a compress. Memory swept his senses like a brushfire and he jerked, searching. Had they moved the body while he slept? 

“Easy, Winchester.” Potter spoke in his horse-gentling tone, a rough whisper because it was so late. 

“Sir? The Corporal?” 

“He’s breathing, son. More than that… only time will tell.” He gripped the man’s shoulder, as if to transfer strength through his warm, strong touch. “But I know Maxwell Q. Klinger and I know he would want us to bet on him pulling through.” 

Winchester took hold of the compress; it felt heavenly… it also felt strange that he could even still feel. “Colonel… it occurred to me… as I worked… forgive me, sir, but I sometimes  _ forget _ the proper names of our personnel here.” 

Assuming his exhausted and injured surgeon was just talking out of his head, the bird Colonel humored him. “People do dissolve into their roles in the army - or in a hospital for that matter.” 

“But he has always been Max.” 

_ Oh.  _ So the sophisticated surgeon from the sea-reach state hadn’t been left tetched by his ordeal - just enlightened. “You say that like you think it might just mean a thing or two, Major.” 

“I didn’t know, Colonel. Not until I had his blood on my hands and saw his heart beating and exposed. How… horrible… of a man must I be to need so awful a sign?” 

Potter patted his knee. “Love makes Grade A idiots of us all, Winchester. You’re not the first or the last man who only saw what was in his fingers as it slipped through.”

Charles covered his hand, a boy begging for a father’s strength, a father’s blessing. “What do I do, Colonel?” 

Potter squeezed the hand he had been given. Winchester had been assigned to the 4077th seven months ago; in that moment, he was welcomed home. “Two things. No, three. You listening?” 

“Yes, sir. I hang on every word.” 

“First: after you shower and sleep and eat something halfway decent, you let me examine you and patch you up. You’re in sad shape for courting, looking like this. Two, you get on the horn to that dear sister of yours and settle things up proper. If you’re going to marry a younger man, you owe it to him to see he’s well cared for - especially if your honeymoon suite’s beside a minefield. Three, make sure that sweet immigrant kid wakes up to the prettiest ring that ever shined against black velvet. He’ll sew his own dress, I reckon. The padre’ll bless us every one, and I’ll give away the blushing bride. Will that do for it?”

“Yes, sir.” Then, hoping, crying a little, “You think he’ll live? Really, sir?”

“Winchester, that needle of yours had more of your soul wrapped around it than it had silk. I’ve seen some tricks in my time, but if you did less than sew some of your strong spirit into his broken spaces, I’ll hang up my spurs for good.” 

“Thank you, sir.” 

“It’s you who’s owed thanks. You know how I hate breaking in a new company clerk.” 

They laughed together and the night felt a fraction less dark. 

***

It did happen as the CO had said it would, too. 

Charles wondered later if the habit of long command gave one a long view… but he cared only that Maxwell lived and was his - and if he kept the man away from helipad triage as best he could - well, no one really blamed him for that. 

End!

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
